Unstructured data presents a goldmine of information, but mining that gold is no easy task—it requires coding with detailed text analysis. To be clear, unstructured data includes customer survey text comments, customer service calls, emails, chats, reviews, and other narrative sources of information. It’s the data that doesn’t fall into neat, easy categories—so the signal often gets lost in the noise.

Some companies are so stumped by their unstructured data that they just toss it and hope no gold nuggets were lost. This is a grave mistake because customer verbatims are—quite literally—the voice of the customer.

Here’s what’s going on with unstructured data:

Companies don’t know the best practices for quantifying their unstructured data, so they rely on out-of-the-box software solutions. Or worse, they simply read the comments, but this doesn’t provide the precise metrics you need for success.

In our ROI-driven world, managers are unsure if rigorous text analysis will lead to a profitable payoff—but the fact is, it probably will.

Food for Thought: How would your company be more profitable with greater visibility into your unstructured data?